What Happens When a Culture Warrior and a Confident Pluralist Exchange Tweets About Trump’s Border Wall?

Last week I did a post on evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem’s biblical defense of Donald Trump’s border wall.

Here is what a couple of smart people tweeted about Grudem’s defense of the wall:

I admire much of Wayne Grudem’s work. But this is crass politicization of biblical interpretation. It helps confirm secular critics’ worst caricatures of evangelicalism as politics masquerading as piety. https://t.co/vax3eCAGAO

While I sincerely appreciate Dr. Grudem trying to use the Bible to justify a policy, this is just so outrageously dumb I cannot believe a prof thinks like this. They fought with candles and trumpets in the Bible, too. I’m waiting to hear if he thinks that’s good for the Pentagon. https://t.co/Io32Vnd3dE

Further, this isn’t the first time Dr. Grudem has made policy pronouncements based a prooftext or worse. Gun ownership rights drawn simply from Matthew 26:52? Tax policy from half a verse in Proverbs? You have got to talk some Biblical sense into how he mishandles the Word.

I can’t read Metaxas’s Twitter feed because I was blocked (and disparaged by Metaxas on more than one occasion) after I wrote a multi-post review exposing the serious historical errors in one of his recent books. But it appears that he is now claiming that “thin-skinned Jacobins” are oppressing him for his remarks about Inazu. Katelyn Beaty, a writer and former managing editor of Christianity Today, is having none of it:

You are not being silenced or oppressed, Eric. If you say self-admittedly stupid things in public, other people will react to those stupid things. Free speech does not give you license to say stupid things without consequence. That’s not how it works.

Inazu, on the other hand, is a Christian law professor at a prestigious Midwestern university and a member of the Board of Trustees of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. His book Confident Pluralism is a call for Americans, including evangelical Christians, to learn to live together while respecting their deepest differences. It is, in many ways, the antithesis of Metaxas’s culture-war approach.

The two approaches to culture are quite different and I think we see them playing out, to a degree, in this Twitter exchange.

Has anyone posted a detailed rebuttal of Grudem? Most of what I’ve seen here is just citations of people who say “that’s stupid and not what the Bible really says.” They don’t actually try to dismantle his arguments, and neither does this post. It merely dismisses them.

LOL Right? It’s not a caricature, it’s who they are at their collective core. It’s exhausting to listen to the moderates wring their hands and say, “This fringe doesn’t represent us” when in fact the fringe is a huge, even majority segment of the group. Religious fanaticism and magical thinking got Donald Trump elected.